How Headless Commerce is Becoming the Future of Retail

As the retail experience is becoming more multiplexed, digitally-savvy consumers expect a seamless experience more than ever. Whether the customer is shopping online or in-store, a unified and uninterrupted experience is what they expect.

When the front-end of your e-commerce website is decoupled from the back-end, it is called headless commerce. Headless commerce is essentially a centralized API being consumed by many different clients on different channels. The front-end and back-end become two independent entities and provide retailers with more flexibility in terms of where they can deliver their content. It also opens up a world of possibility from a client acquisition standpoint, as well as a way to offer more interfaces for e-commerce customers to interact with. A development strategy like headless commerce is a no brainer for content focused brands. It saves a lot of money and time for brands who live on CMS platforms and they no longer have to re-platform in order to add e-commerce into their digital experience.

Why Headless commerce?

Flexibility: The traditional commerce platforms take away the much-need flexibility required to make even the slightest changes. Even small customization can require developers to go deep into the database, which is expensive and time-consuming. With headless commerce, a change in the UI/UX only require front-end customizations and allows the front-end developers to experiment with the interfaces more freely. Reaction Commerce and Moltin are two platforms advocating this approach and opening up their front-end APIs to allow for headless implementations.

Omni-channel capabilities: A headless CMS puts omnichannel strategies in the center for customer experience and has no constraints in pushing your content on different platforms. You can present a completely new channel without heavy customizations in the backend.

Seamless Integration: Headless commerce facilitates seamless integration with any system allowing customers to directly look for products using voice assistance and other technologically advanced programs. Unlike a headless CMS, traditional commerce platforms, on the other hand, requires a lot of coding customization in the back-end to achieve this.

Speed: As mentioned, the decoupled architecture of headless commerce lets you make rapid changes on the front-end without disturbing anything in the backend and vice versa. Hence, new integrations can be applied easily in a time and cost-effective way.

Headless commerce is helping companies to rapidly adapt to the way the consumers are using their web and mobile applications while also providing them a richer user experience. Whether it’s integrating with a chatbot, voice recognition such as Alexa or any other technology, it helps with seamless integration and letting the companies reach customers anywhere.

Guest Writer at Today's Ecommerce, Pulkit is the Founder at ILoveFashionRetail. He specializes in helping fashion businesses grow through technology. Pulkit's essays on Ecommerce are featured by Forbes, Moz, Bloomsberry, FIT and more.